LOCAL GROUP JOINS ILLEGAL-IMMIGRANT WATCH
Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/27/06
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news … 194093.htm

Its border-control campaign was born a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the Tombstone (Ariz.) Militia, which evolved into the national Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. The mission of the controversial organization - and of loosely allied groups such as Ryan’s - is to keep out illegal immigrants it believes could be terrorists, drug traffickers or disease carriers and who depress U.S. wages, founder Chris Simcox says. . .

Last April, at the group’s monthlong Minuteman Project, 1,200 volunteers converged along 23 miles of the Arizona border and reported 200 attempted crossings to the U.S. Border Patrol, Simcox said. Their role is reconnaissance, he said. The Minutemen do not become physically involved. . .

Monitors from the Southern Poverty Law Center have reported the presence of self-declared white supremacists at Minuteman border events. Simcox acknowledges that he sent a half-dozen groups home last year. . .

“It really burns me,” said Frank Shiery, 47, whose wife had to wait nine months to emigrate from China on a fiancee visa.

But that’s not the main reason the martial-arts instructor, from Willow Grove, will patrol the Canadian border from a Mohawk reservation in New York next month. He fears Islamic terrorists.

“I view Islam as the scourge of the earth,” Shiery said. “It is pure unadulterated evil.”

I would like your thoughts on the Abdul Rahman / Afghanistan case. Clearly, the post-Taliban Afghanistan will go through some severe growing pains as it attempts to crawl away from the Taliban’s take on things. In addition, war for the moment seems to be in the past.

We are seeing first-hand the democratic process. A constitution is a document that must be interpreted all the time. Different generations will see things differently than their forefathers — especially as technology, communications, and human rights movements increase. It was obviously difficult to let this apostate go (and he was released on a technicality). Now, the man’s fate is still up for grabs.

Thoughts?

Well isn’t this just special. You all know that my opinion is that all settlements are illegal. I stand behind anyone that wants to punish Israel for their decades and decades of abuse of the Palestinian people. This latest move by Olmert proves that Israel is not in the mood to discuss the issue with the oppressed, but would rather continue to be the oppressor. Why won’t Olmert speak with the newly elected Hamas government? Is Israel a hypocrite? After years of crying that they aren’t ‘recognized’ do they now turn away from the Palestinians and pretend they don’t exist? It is my wish that the US and other countries laugh at this notion and tell Israel to work it out with Palestine. I *doubt* my wish will come true.

Olmert Promotes West Bank Pullout ahead of Israeli Elections
By Robert Berger
Jerusalem
26 March 2006

With Israeli elections just two days away, the frontrunner is spelling out his vision for the nation’s future borders. Israel plans to bypass the Palestinians and negotiate instead with the world powers.

Israel’s Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he will seek U.S. and international approval for his plan to draw Israel’s final borders unilaterally over the next four years. Interviewed on Israel Radio, Mr. Olmert said there is great openness to his plan in the U.S. and other countries.

Mr. Olmert has said that Tuesday’s election is a referendum on his plan to withdraw from large parts of the West Bank and to dismantle many settlements. At the same time, he would hold on to big settlement blocs and attach them to Israel.

Pentagon: Russia fed U.S. war plans to Iraq
Russian official: Report ‘unfounded’

Saturday, March 25, 2006; Posted: 7:12 a.m. EST (12:12 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) — As U.S. troops moved toward Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein received intelligence about their battle strategy and troop movements from a Russian ambassador, according to a Pentagon report.

The Russians claimed they obtained the information from sources inside the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and conveyed it to Hussein via the Russian ambassador to Iraq, the report said.

Russia dismissed the report on Saturday. “Such unfounded accusations have been voiced regularly,” said a Russian spokesman. “We do not see fit to comment on these insinuations.” (Watch how the Russians reportedly warned Iraq when the Americans were coming — 1:18 )

Duvi may have seen this already, but I thought I would bring it here because it is just so….I don’t know what…..interesting, strange, unbelievable, believable….I don’t know. If nothing else it is the mother of all conspiracy theories. I’m not really sure what to make of it. I knew some folks questioned the events of Sept 11, 2001, but I guess I didn’t expect this.

And, yeah I know I’m supposed to be working on my report. Just had to share this. I’m going back to work now

Actor Charlie Sheen Questions Official 9/11 Story
Calls for truly independent investigation, joins growing ranks of prominent credible whistleblowers

Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | March 20 2006

Actor Charlie Sheen has joined a growing army of other highly credible public figures in questioning the official story of 9/11 and calling for a new independent investigation of the attack and the circumstances surrounding it.

Over the past two years, scores of highly regarded individuals have gone public to express their serious doubts about 9/11. These include former presidential advisor and CIA analyst Ray McGovern, the father of Reaganomics and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, BYU physics Professor Steven Jones, former German defense minister Andreas von Buelow, former MI5 officer David Shayler, former Blair cabinet member Michael Meacher, former Chief Economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush’s first term Morgan Reynolds and many more.

Remainder of article:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/ma … esheen.htm

http://www.alternet.org/story/33708/

Lapham’s Case for Impeachment
by Terrence McNally | AlterNet

Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham explains why he wrote his provocative essay arguing for the impeachment of George W. Bush.

In November 1972 Richard Nixon won 61 percent of the popular vote, carried 49 of 50 states and won the Electoral College 520-17. Yet only three months later the Senate voted 77-0 to hold hearings investigating the Watergate break-in and its coverup — a bit of petty theft, a campaign dirty trick that could hardly have made the difference in one of the most lopsided elections in U.S. history. A year later the House voted 414-4 that the Judiciary Committee investigate whether there were grounds for impeachment. Three articles of impeachment were eventually approved by the committee, and in August 1974 Nixon resigned before he could actually be impeached.

In 1999 Bill Clinton was acquitted by a vote of the full Senate after being impeached over lying about an extramarital affair.

Today George W. Bush sits apparently shielded from accountability by loyal and unified Republican control of the House and Senate. Bush, who deceived this nation into a catastrophic war and has admitted domestic wiretaps without warrants in clear violation of federal law, has seemed invulnerable to even the possibility of impeachment.

Is the tide finally beginning to turn?

Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine for nearly 30 years, wrote a cover essay for the March issue of the magazine that makes a strong and well-reasoned case for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Lapham has recently shifted roles, becoming editor emeritus so that he can devote himself to editing Lapham’s Quarterly , a new journal about history, while continuing to write his monthly column for Harper’s .

TERRENCE MCNALLY: I had to go to four newsstands to buy a copy of the March issue of Harper’s . The first three were sold out. I assume it’s because of the red sleeve attached to the cover with the words “IMPEACH HIM” in large bold letters. Why did you write this now?

LEWIS LAPHAM: In late December I came across a report that had been assembled by congressman John Conyers of Michigan which lays out much of this case. He had begun to assemble a report a year ago in May, before the discovery of the Bush administration’s use of the NSA to impose electronic surveillance on American citizens.

TM: So before what seems most clearly to be a violation of federal law?

LL: Right. Conyers held a series of hearings last summer on what are known as the Downing Street Minutes, a series of memoranda that were exchanged back and forth within the British government in the spring and summer of 2002, between its officials in London and its representatives in Washington. It becomes very clear in the correspondence that the Bush administration is determined to go to war in Iraq no matter what the facts are. And it’s clear that there are no weapons of mass destruction, that there is no connection between Saddam and Al Qaida, that Saddam is not in any kind of a position to pose a threat — certainly to the United States or probably not even to any of the countries in the Middle East.

The British intelligence people are saying to each other that Washington is determined to invade, and they’re going to fix the facts to fit their wish. There had been suspicions and rumors of this for two or three years, but here it was in print. The memoranda were not rejected or contradicted by the British government. Conyers held a hearing, and then sent a letter to the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon signed by 130 members of the House of Representatives.

TM: I’ll bet most people think Conyers was out there alone. One hundred thirty people signed this letter?

LL: It could be 120 or 124, but it was a substantial number, and it was backed by signatures from 500,000 American citizens acquired over the internet. The petition to the administration sought answers to questions. This is what has been said — what do you have to say about it? And of course there was a stonewall; there was no answer whatever.

Reacting to that, Conyers then set out with his staff to find out what could be learned from open sources — press, books, congressional testimony — to establish that a criminal fraud was perpetrated on the American people and on the American Congress in going to war. When he released the report — 182 pages with 1,100 footnotes — there was no mention at all in any of the mainstream press. As far as the New York Times ,Washington Post , the networks and so forth were concerned, it never happened.

I called Conyers’ office and asked if they could send a copy. I read it, and it seemed to me an impressive piece of work, at least worth being discussed and given broader circulation. I wrote the essay in somewhat the same spirit that Conyers had presented the report, which was to at least ask the questions.

I said to Conyers, look, you’ve got no chance of getting an impeachment motion going in the House of Representatives, which is controlled with an iron fist by the Republican majority.

TM: Whereas, in the case of Nixon, there were Republicans like Howard Baker, not the lockstep partisanship that we face today.

LL: Exactly. Subsequent to writing the essay, I came across George Washington’s farewell address. In it, he says that we in the United States must be very vigilant against the despotism likely to be imposed by one party on the other. Our government only works with a balance of power between the judiciary, the legislative and the executive.

TM: Some wise people I’ve interviewed have pointed out that while we were one of the first to institute this sort of democracy, it doesn’t mean ours is the best form. Many other countries have learned from our model and have instituted proportional representation, parliamentary elections and so on. Here, short of impeachment, a president is assured of four years, so checks and balances become all the more important.

LL: And I think that is a weakness in our system and a strength in some of the European systems, where you can have a vote of no confidence.

TM: At this moment — after Katrina, the release of the illegal wiretap information, and 34 percent approval ratings and 70 percent against the war — you would call an election.

LL: Yes.

TM: I suspect this despotic reign may be reinforced by both John Roberts and Samuel Alito with their interpretations of a “unitary executive” and a more imperial presidency.

LL: That’s entirely possible. We don’t know yet, but I think that’s a pretty fair supposition.

People tend to forget that we have three branches of government, and that it is the constitutional task of the Congress to assert its power to correct the imbalance of power when it gets out of hand, which it now clearly has. For Congress not to do this is an abdication of their responsibilities.

Let’s go back to the ’70s. There were Republicans, Baker among them, who knew that it was their duty to act as senators and not simply as representatives of a political party. When you mention branches of government to people these days, they’re apt to think you mean Democrat and Republican.

There was greater political consciousness during the impeachment proceedings against Nixon because the country was emerging from a poorly conceived war in Vietnam, a very clear demonstration of what happens when the government in Washington acts in secret.

TM: Though not as assertive as they might have been, Congress did at critical moments stand up to Johnson and to Nixon.

LL: They did. We’ve lost some of that backbone over the last 30 years. There’s been a softening of the American political will and energy within both parties.

TM: Finally, given the political calculus we’ve just been talking about, you do not see impeachment as likely — what’s your best-case scenario when this kind of information gets out into the general public?

LL: I hope for a gradual raising of the political consciousness. You now see Sen. Russell Feingold suggesting a motion to censure of the president for his actions with regard to electronic surveillance. A motion to censure is preliminary to a motion to impeach. So you have more people talking about it, and you have more people trying to understand the constitutional crisis and what’s at risk.

What’s at risk is our constitutional system of government. More people need to understand that. They also need to understand their power as citizens. More people need to remember these people work for us.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org ).

Ok, many of you have read that South Park was unable to re-air an episode that makes fun at Scientology and Tom Cruise. Chef (Isaac Hayes) is leaving the show, citing religious intolerance. Uh… hello Chef — you have watched South Park over the past 10 years right? Anyway, some are accusing Cruise of threatening not to promote Mission: Impossible 3. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which is owned by Paramount, which is putting out the movie.

In light of the cartoon fiasco, what are your opinions on this if in fact Cruise did put pressure on Comedy Central? What does this say about censorship in the US?

Election fraud, protests in the streets, and the thoughtpolice: The makings of a good Holywood film (or maybe its just the reality with elections nowadays). Lukashenko is anti-West in many ways. His victory (apparently by a very large margin) has ruffled wuite a few feathers around the world…

Protesters stage protest vigil in Belarus
Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:20 AM ET9
By Olena Horodetska

MINSK (Reuters) - Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko faced challenges on Tuesday to his re-election from both Western governments and opposition protesters who camped overnight in the capital to press their call for a new poll.

Lukashenko, in power for 12 years and criticized by the opposition and in the West for authoritarian Soviet-style rule, swept back into office on Monday with an official tally of 82.6 percent.

Nearest rival Alexander Milinkevich, with 6 percent, called the poll fraudulent, a view shared widely in the West. The result, never in doubt given Lukashenko’s control over much of public life and media, put Washington and Moscow at odds.

Indian ‘witchcraft’ family killed

A family of five has been beheaded in Sonitpur district, north-east India, by a mob who accused them of witchcraft.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4822750.stm

This was a series of huge events staged all around the world. My wife and I watched Fox news last night. They didn’t report it. They even went “around the world in 80 seconds” without mention. Then they talked about a dog show for what seemed to be 3 minutes. Anyway, I am happy that we have some people around us willing to take action when the time comes…

….

Anti-war protests marking the third anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq were continuing today, a day after tens of thousands of people took to streets around the world to demand coalition troops pull out of the country…

The Invention That Makes al-Qaeda Rich
by Greg McArthur | Globe & Mail

OTTAWA ? When the British police raided the homes of the terrorists, the evidence was plentiful: Travel documents hidden in a baby walker, videotapes of Osama bin Laden speeches and in the wardrobe, a stack of pamphlets titled Jihad and Preparation.

It was the morning of Sept. 25, 2001, and the anti-terrorism squads had just raided two homes in a working-class district of Leicester, U.K., a neighbourhood of terraced, red-brick homes, dominated by immigrants. The arrests were supposed to be the final kick at a crumbling terrorist cell and bring down one of its ringleaders.

But, like so many people before them, it took the police some time before they recognized the genius of this operation.

When the officers finally got around to popping the trunk of the terrorists’ Ford Fiesta, there it was.

Buried inside a Compaq laptop was a Canadian innovation ? software that had helped finance al-Qaeda terrorists who were plotting to blow up the U.S. embassy in Paris.

This is how it got there.

—————–

As a child, Rob Cattral’s problems with authority always got in the way of his scholastic success. He spit in class. He threw apples. By Grade 7, he was placed in a special class reserved for underachievers. ?It was like pulling teeth to get me to do a book report,? he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

He had impressive scores on standardized tests and at least one visit to a child psychologist, but his Ottawa teachers could never harness young Rob’s mind.

This was the early 1980s, at least a decade before public educators would invest in the one thing that would get him to focus ? a computer.

It was only when he was fiddling with an electronic appliance or in front of the computer in his parents’ basement that he applied his intellect. Organizing numbers into codes, and using those codes to perform functions, came naturally. And it wasn’t until high school, when his father talked an upstart high-tech company into giving his son a job interview, that his talent was appreciated.

?He was a very bright lad,? said Ray Novokowsky, the man who hired Mr. Cattral as a 17-year-old. ?He could do things some of my other programmers couldn’t do. He’s a self-starter.?

Mr. Novokowsky’s company had been hired to develop software that could keep track of the federal government’s assets. By sticking bar codes on everything in the bureaucracy ? desks, chairs, computers ? and integrating it with software, they could monitor all of it, right down to the last telephone.

This was it ? the beginning of Rob Cattral’s fascination with collecting and analyzing data. If you could use computers and bar codes to keep track of staplers and calculators, you could use them to keep track of anything, even people and their behaviour.

But Mr. Cattral hadn’t lost that edge from his personality. He began hanging out with a rougher crowd. When his friends ran afoul of a neighbourhood drug dealer ? a hash deal that left both sides angry ? Mr. Cattral blended his aptitude for technology with his aptitude for raising hell.

Nowadays, he calls the idea ?dumb? but in February of 1991 he helped his friends fashion a homemade bomb from a propane cylinder and they put it on the drug dealer’s car. It never ignited, but the threat sparked a police investigation.

Three months later, Mr. Cattral was arrested and charged with possession of explosives and attempted murder. It got worse for the young man when, as he was leaving the courthouse one day, he got into a shouting match with a female friend of the drug dealer. The spat earned him a new charge of violating the conditions of his bail and he was put back in a jail cell. He didn’t like the idea of staying there until his trial, which was still months away, so he agreed to plead guilty and the Crown dropped the attempted-murder charge.

At his sentencing in January of 1992, Judge Bernard Ryan gave his assessment of Mr. Cattral.

?You are a very disturbed man,? the judge told Mr. Cattral, according to an article in the Ottawa Citizen, before he sentenced him to 20 months.

At some point during his stay in a Northern Ontario correctional facility, where he spent his days reading Ed McBain detective novels and playing cards, he decided to make a change.

?It was the biggest waste of time possible. When I’m out here,? he said, referring to life outside jail, ?I think a mile a minute.

?It was that little stint that made me think of going back to university.?

Carleton University was not like high school. The learning was self directed, and there were like-minded students and professors in the department of computer science, people who appreciated technology’s limitless potential.

He knocked off an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree and began working toward a PhD. He also took a job as a teacher’s assistant, introducing young minds to the field of cryptology.

?If you ever watched him interact with students, you’d see how he’s very committed to making sure the person that he’s talking to gets the ideas he’s trying to impart,? said Steffen Christensen, a fellow PhD student at Carleton. ?He gives them lots of latitude. He’s known students that have had a hard time. He’s been a student that had a hard time.?

Mr. Cattral had put his past behind him ? except his hankering for data collection.

It was during his early university years that he sat down in his parents’ basement and devised a unique code that would enhance the bar-code software he helped create as a teenager and make him a lot of money.

Rather than using bar codes though, this software would store information from magnetic stripe cards, such as bank cards and video-store memberships. The possibilities for storing data were enormous; every time someone swiped a driver’s licence, a gym membership or even a credit card through a reader, the software would store the data on a computer. Even better, Mr. Cattral designed the program so that it could copy that data onto a new card.

He modified the code, wrote a few variations and sold one of them to a company in California. When he perfected it, he gave it a name ? RenCode 2000 ? and decided to sell it for himself. It was the only software of its kind and was user friendly. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Windows and a RenCode user manual could get a handle on the program.

The company, which he called Canadian Barcode and Plastic Card Supply, sold the software as well as the portable magnetic stripe readers that are needed to swipe the cards through. It had modest earnings for its first few years, but word must have spread because Mr. Cattral began to get customers off the street.

On Jan. 29, 2001, a man who looked Middle Eastern and spoke English without an accent walked into the office and paid $1,700 in cash for a magnetic stripe reader and a copy of RenCode. He said his name was John Almoun, and he left no trace of his visit to the office, except for a vague invoice that indicates he was taking the software to Lebanon.

Mr. Cattral also attracted international clients.

One of them called from Europe. The man claimed he ran a company called AMA Business Cards, and he wanted to purchase RenCode and some portable magnetic stripe readers. The name he provided, Mr. Cattral said, was Kamel Daoudi.

Mr. Cattral didn’t have any reason to be suspicious. Mr. Daoudi’s company even had a website.

?It seemed to be a legitimate company,? he said.

It turns out Mr. Daoudi had interests other than data collection.

It didn’t receive much publicity in Canada, but six weeks before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a different al-Qaeda plot began to unravel.

A high-ranking al-Qaeda operative named Djamel Beghal was detained in a Dubai airport for carrying a false passport. By the time authorities finished their interrogation ? Mr. Beghal claims he was tortured ? they had uncovered the identities of al-Qaeda agents across Europe and a plot to attack U.S. interests in Paris.

Police swooped down on terrorism suspects in Belgium and discovered 61 kilograms of sulphur powder and 40 litres of acetone. They also arrested men in Holland who had attended al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. But in Paris, they missed one important target ? a young Algerian computer expert named Kamel Daoudi who slipped onto a Eurostar train bound for England shortly before the arrests.

When he stepped off the train, he looked up two Algerians living in Leicester. One of them, Brahim Benmerzouga, had worked at various restaurants and a laundromat and dabbled in the used-car business. The other, Baghdad Meziane, lived in a nearby flat.

The local police force was already watching the Algerians closely, but when Mr. Daoudi arrived in town they readied themselves for a raid.

They waited patiently for days, and watched as the men went swimming at a public pool, shopping at a grocery store and as they went to pick up a money transfer. At 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday ? exactly two weeks after the attacks on the United States ? the police struck.

The raids uncovered military equipment ? a solar-powered battery, the same type used by mujahedeen in Afghanistan ? and 66 recruitment videotapes with names such as Lovers of Martyrdom and No Surrender. Diaries and notes kept by the men were littered with coded language, such as ?production of butter,? ?washed clothes? and ?unwashed clothes.?

But there was another type of unexplained code, this computer software called RenCode.

The software installed in the terrorists’ Compaq laptop had a serial number, RC-S031E52, the same serial number of the software purchased by John Almoun, the man who had walked into Mr. Cattral’s office six months earlier with a wad of cash.

Police searched another car belonging to the terrorists, a Peugeot 405. Inside they found a RenCode CD, disks containing data from 90 different credit cards and stacks of phony credit cards. It quickly became clear what the terrorists had been up to ? stealing, storing and copying credit card information from unsuspecting shoppers. The men had figured out that RenCode could help them recreate fraudulent credit cards. They had set up a fundraising drive for their jihad.

The police estimated that Mr. Cattral’s invention, as well as the portable magnetic stripe readers sold by his company, contributed $400,000 to the cause.

The raid was followed by more raids and more discoveries of RenCode. Another Algerian friend of the terrorists, Farid Belaribi, was arrested with the software as well as details from 350 different credit cards, including cards that had been used in Toronto stores. In the years that followed, British police forces, including Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch and the British Transport Police, kept discovering fraudulent credit cards and the Canadian ingenuity behind them.

When it came time to put the Algerian terrorists on trial, the government called in Nicholas Webber, a forensic computer consultant who has been used across Britain as an expert witness. He marvelled at RenCode’s capabilities as he showed the jury how the software works.

?When you . . . run the RenCode program, which is great, I’m going to download all this information,? he told the courtroom as he swiped his credit card through a magnetic stripe reader.

After a two-month trial, the two Leicester terrorists, Mr. Benmerzouga and Mr. Meziane, were convicted of entering into a funding agreement for the purposes of terrorism. Both were sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Mr. Daoudi was sent back to France and found guilty of organizing a suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Paris. Last year, an appeals court reduced his sentence to six years from nine.

The young Algerian computer expert never formally admitted to being part of an al-Qaeda plot, but he did try to share his story with the public. In a letter to a French television station, he declared: ?My ideological commitment is total and the reward of glory for this relentless battle is to be called a terrorist. I accept the name of terrorist if it is used to mean that I terrorize a one-sided system of iniquitous power and a perversity that comes in many forms.?

During the past four years, many police forces have contacted Mr. Cattral and let him know what has become of his brainchild after it left his office. He flew to Britain to testify as a Crown witness against another Algerian man who, using RenCode and equipment from Mr. Cattral’s company, ran an illegal credit card factory with the potential to steal an estimated $12-million.

But the PhD student has remained undeterred. He kept selling his flagship software and profited. In April of 2002, during a span of two weeks, he and his now-ex-girlfriend took a mortgage out on a new $310,000 Ottawa home and he helped his mother buy the $260,000 house next door.

In 2003, his company had more than $1-million in gross sales. During that time he also treated himself to a black, 2003 Z06 Corvette with a retail value of $44,000. When he decided to get vanity licence plates, he picked the name that helped earn his new-found wealth: RENCODE.

The question of where al-Qaeda’s money comes from has long stumped U.S. intelligence services.

The long-held belief was that Osama bin Laden bankrolled his cause with his inherited fortune, presumed to be $300-million. That theory was debunked when, according to the 9/11 Commission, U.S. officials travelled to Saudi Arabia and confirmed that Mr. bin Laden’s share was closer to $1-million a year, not nearly enough to support his worldwide network. Mr. bin Laden’s personal finances were also hampered in 1994 when the Saudi government forced his relatives to sell his portion of the family company, and then promptly froze the proceeds of the sale.

Before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, almost all attempts by the CIA to detect al-Qaeda’s financing scheme were unsuccessful. Even after 19 months of poring over documents and interviewing more than 1,000 people, the 9/11 Commission was unable to say with any certainty the origins of the estimated $500,000 that was used to fund the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report did make a prediction, though: As al-Qaeda disintegrates into smaller, decentralized groups, terrorists will fund themselves through crime.

Mr. Cattral doesn’t dismiss these things when he talks about his software. He is unabashed and transparent about the crimes that have been committed because of his creation. ?It’s true it provides an avenue for people to generate revenue illegitimately,? he acknowledged. ?It’s unfortunate that some people use it for illegitimate purposes.?

But he insists RenCode was never intended to steal and copy credit card information. Rather, he said, it was designed to help businesses, governments or people collect data, legally. He has a long list of legitimate clients, he said. They include gyms and the California Department of Agriculture, which has used his software to monitor trucks that haul fruits and vegetables across the state. Many of his clients, he said, come from the trade show industry, which uses magnetic stripe readers to track potential customers as they peruse booths.

He said he had no idea about the intentions of Mr. Daoudi, the mysterious Mr. Almoun, or any of the terrorism suspects in Britain who have been arrested with his software. As for how these men knew to come to him for their fundraising needs, he suspects they either discovered his technology on the Internet or heard about credit card fraud through the media.

?It is a bit of a guess,? he said.

He also questions how useful his technology would be to a terrorist’s cause, pointing out that the amount of money raised by buying items with phony credit cards and then reselling the goods would pale in comparison to other types of crime, such as a car theft.

And any suggestion that he is aiding Islamic terrorism is faulty, he said. Every time someone is shot or stabbed, the police don’t link the gun manufacturer or the knife salesmen to the crime, so why is he being linked to terrorism?

?Terrorism goes contrary to everything I’m working toward ? building a career, building a company,? he said.

Those goals have been stalled, at least temporarily, by a joint police investigation led by the Ontario Provincial Police.

In July of 2004, Mr. Cattral and three employees from his company were arrested and his office was raided. Mr. Cattral was charged with forging credit cards and selling devices used to forge credit cards, and his company was hit with severe, temporary restrictions on selling RenCode and the magnetic stripe readers. But the most significant accusation was that Mr. Cattral and his co-workers were participating in a criminal organization. It’s one of the first times the law, which was passed in 1997 in an attempt to quash the war in Quebec between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine, has been applied to someone other than a biker or a member of the Mafia.

Essentially, the police have said that the primary purpose of Mr. Cattral’s company is to facilitate crime for the material benefit of the computer scientist and his employees. RenCode is being put on trial, a proceeding that is slated to start by early 2007.

The authorities have a narrow-minded view of his creation and his company, Mr. Cattral said, and he said he worries about the consequences if they’re able to impose that view on a judge or jury.

He’s currently finishing his thesis in data mining, an exploding field that many people ? statisticians, academics, executives ? believe is on the cusp of something huge. The study, which uses complex algorithms to find significant relationships between things that, on the surface, don’t appear to be connected, could change the world. The most commonly cited case is the beer and diapers discovery.

Using computers, researchers have sorted through mounds of information ? attained from receipts ? looking for correlations, and some now believe that when men buy diapers for their children, they often buy beer. That discreet relationship, if true, could pay off for U.S. stores, which could capitalize by putting either diapers or beer on sale, but never both. Besides retail though, data mining has many applications. Ironically, it has been widely reported that the U.S. National Security Agency is using data mining to find suspicious relationships between the countless number of transactions that take place everyday in stores, banks, airports and on the Internet in an attempt to pre-empt terrorist strikes.

But in order to make these findings, researchers need data. That means they need a mechanism to record information: receipts, surveys or magnetic stripe readers and software such as RenCode.

That makes RenCode worth fighting for, Mr. Cattral said, and it’s a battle he’s willing to take to the Supreme Court, if need be.

?It is an issue of pride ? that’s why I don’t want to give it up. They see it as this evil software ? that’s why I don’t want to give it up.?

With a report from Celia Donnelly

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ … ional/home

I found this very disturbing. I’m comforted somewhat by the fact that this man now realizes that revenge is not a reason for war, but I don’t find the situation as unique as the article claims. Perhaps the father/son angle is unique, but the thoughts and feelings expressed by this gentleman - his reason for going, for wanting to participate in this war are not unique. For me that fact is very distressing.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/ … 30904.html

March 17, 2006, 1:24PM
Father Loses Taste for Revenge in Iraq

By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent
© 2006 The Associated Press

AL-ASAD, Iraq — In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin. It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson’s Georgia doorstep with the news. Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who’d gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was suddenly dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb planted in a Baghdad slum.

Today it’s Joe who mans the M-240 atop a Humvee, warily watching the sides of the road, an unlikely Army corporal at 48, a father who came here for revenge, a Christian missionary on a crusade against Islam, and a man who, after six months at war, is ready to go home.

“I shouldn’t even have come,” he now says. And if he leaves bloody Iraq with no blood on his hands, he says, that’s fine, too.

The Johnson family story is unique, even strange. But in a war where soldiers have heard an ever-changing medley of reasons for fighting, Joe Johnson’s may be as simple and direct as any _ and to many, as troubling.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4816152.stm

Is it me or is the French Government terribly out of touch with the French people? And good news for Muslims: Here is some proof that the Muslim world doesn’t own a monopoly on violent protests.

Violence erupts in French student protests
Thu Mar 16, 2006 7:48 PM GMT162
By Kerstin Gehmlich and Anna Willard

PARIS (Reuters) - French police used teargas and water cannon when violence erupted as students turned up the heat on Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin over a jobs law on Thursday, while his government struggled to defuse the crisis.

Stone-throwing protesters clashed with police at the end of a march by several thousand university and high school students in Paris and later outside the Sorbonne university. A kiosk was set ablaze and several shop windows were smashed.